Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Tasmanian.Kris has added a photo to the pool:

I liked the emptiness of this stretch, the kind of road where nothing happens for a long time and that’s the whole point. The yellow flowers add a bit of unintentional cheer. A simple roadside frame, taken because the light was flat and honest.

Weer voor Rotterdam 🌕

Huidige temperatuur (om 01:15): 7.8°C (Licht bewolkt)
Windsnelheid: 14.0 km/u (3.9 m/s), richting: ↑ 202°

Luchtkwaliteit:

• AQI: 63 🟡 (Matig)
• PM2.5: 12.5 μg/m³
• PM10: 15.5 μg/m³

Voorspelling voor de komende dagen:

• zaterdag 07 februari: Min 5.8°, Max 12.1° (Bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 2%, Windsnelheid: 18.0 km/u (5.0 m/s), richting: ↑ 169°
• zondag 08 februari: Min 5.7°, Max 11.3° (Bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 3%, Windsnelheid: 14.8 km/u (4.1 m/s), richting: ↖ 130°
• maandag 09 februari: Min 1.7°, Max 6.4° (Bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 1%, Windsnelheid: 19.1 km/u (5.3 m/s), richting: ← 107°
• dinsdag 10 februari: Min -0.2°, Max 6.5° (Bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 23%, Windsnelheid: 9.8 km/u (2.7 m/s), richting: ← 112°
• woensdag 11 februari: Min 6.3°, Max 10.3° (Matige motregen) 🌦️, Neerslag 6.0, Kans op neerslag 61%, Windsnelheid: 22.5 km/u (6.2 m/s), richting: ↗ 217°
• donderdag 12 februari: Min 6.4°, Max 8.8° (Lichte motregen) 🌦️, Neerslag 2.9, Kans op neerslag 42%, Windsnelheid: 13.6 km/u (3.8 m/s), richting: ↗ 240°
• vrijdag 13 februari: Min 0.9°, Max 6.4° (Lichte sneeuw) ❄️, Neerslag 4.5, Kans op neerslag 28%, Windsnelheid: 15.2 km/u (4.2 m/s), richting: ↓ 357°

Uurlijkse voorspelling voor de komende 12 uur:

• 02:00: 7.8° (Gedeeltelijk bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 7%, Windsnelheid: 15.1 km/u (4.2 m/s), richting: ↑ 202°
• 03:00: 7.4° (Bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 3%, Windsnelheid: 14.0 km/u (3.9 m/s), richting: ↗ 204°
• 04:00: 7.1° (Bewolkt) ☁️, Windsnelheid: 12.6 km/u (3.5 m/s), richting: ↑ 198°
• 05:00: 6.8° (Licht bewolkt) 🌕, Windsnelheid: 13.0 km/u (3.6 m/s), richting: ↑ 197°
• 06:00: 6.4° (Helder) 🌕, Windsnelheid: 12.2 km/u (3.4 m/s), richting: ↑ 186°
• 07:00: 6.3° (Helder) 🌕, Windsnelheid: 11.9 km/u (3.3 m/s), richting: ↑ 183°
• 08:00: 5.8° (Helder) 🌕, Windsnelheid: 11.2 km/u (3.1 m/s), richting: ↑ 174°
• 09:00: 5.9° (Zonnig) ☀️, Windsnelheid: 12.2 km/u (3.4 m/s), richting: ↑ 174°
• 10:00: 6.5° (Zonnig) ☀️, Windsnelheid: 13.7 km/u (3.8 m/s), richting: ↑ 171°
• 11:00: 7.4° (Bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 1%, Windsnelheid: 14.0 km/u (3.9 m/s), richting: ↑ 170°
• 12:00: 8.1° (Bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 2%, Windsnelheid: 12.6 km/u (3.5 m/s), richting: ↖ 156°
• 13:00: 10.0° (Zonnig) ☀️, Kans op neerslag 2%, Windsnelheid: 15.8 km/u (4.4 m/s), richting: ↑ 159°

Gegevens geleverd door Open-Meteo

#Rotterdam #Meteo #MeteoBot #MeteoNetherlands #OpenMeteo #FediMeteo

Youthful leader feels he can bring change this election despite the fate of its 2023 predecessor, Move Forward, which was dissolved by authorities

A flood of gifts are passed by adoring fans to 38-year-old Thai politician Natthaphong Ruengpanyawut. Supporters, many of them young students, hand over orange garlands, plastic oranges on string, fresh orange fruit, a bunch of bananas and some corn on the cob.

The trademark orange colour is one of the few things that has remained constant for his youthful, pro-reform party, which has been dissolved twice by Thailand’s constitutional court, and forced to regroup under new names and new leaders.

Continue reading...

Nathan Smith, 27, known professionally as DJ Young Slade, was music producer, artist, engineer and NYU graduate

American rapper Lil Jon said on Friday that his son, Nathan Smith, has died, the record producer confirmed in a joint statement with Smith’s mother after police found a body in a pond north of Atlanta, Georgia.

“I am extremely heartbroken for the tragic loss of our son, Nathan Smith. His mother [Nicole Smith] and I are devastated,” the statement said.

Continue reading...

Al de hele week verheug ik me op het concert van vrijdag 6 februari in het Muziekgebouw aan ’t IJ met mijn favoriete Bachcantate: ‘Nach dir, Herr, verlanget mich’.

NRC maakt ieder weekend een selectie uit het media-aanbod. Meer kijk-, lees-, luister- en gametips zijn te vinden in de Slim Leven-gidsen op nrc.nl en in de cultuurnieuwsbrieven van NRC.

Wekelijks een opmerkelijk beeld van een wetenschappelijke gebeurtenis

Langs de Kleine Beerze woedt een stille strijd: elke week haalt het waterschap een stuk van de dam weg, elke nacht bouwt de bever verder. Hoeveel bevers kan Nederland met zijn postzegeltjesnatuur aan?

Fotografie Merlin Daleman

Hoe voel je je als je in Milaan zonder zo’n pak met een paar duizendsten verschil verliest?

Ten years ago I wrote that there is no “technology industry”. It’s more true than ever.

There is no “tech”. There’s no such thing as “a FAANG company”. There is almost nothing in common between the very largest tech companies and the next several hundred biggest companies that happen to create tech platforms. Whatever shorthand we use for the biggest tech companies, they almost never have much in common—whether it's how they make money, what products they make, how they make decisions, who leads them, or what drives their cultures.

It’s important to make these distinctions because the false categorization of wildly dissimilar organizations into one grouping leads to absurdly inappropriate decisions being made. Let’s look at some simple examples to understand why.

Take the once-ubiquitous shorthand of “FAANG” to describe big tech. (It stood, at one time, for Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google. Then Facebook became Meta and Google became Alphabet and Microsoft became upset about not being included, and people started trying to use other more unwieldy, less-popular sobriquets.) This abbreviation still persists because of the mindset it represents, and it is still useful in capturing a certain vision of how the industry functions. I often encounter early-career tech workers who describe their ambitions as “working at a FAANG company”.

But let’s look at what these different companies actually do. For all its complexity, Netflix is, at its heart, about streaming video to people. Meta runs a number of communications platforms and social networks. Apple sells hardware devices. They all have very large side businesses that do other things, but this is what these companies are at their core — and they’re wildly different businesses in their core essence!

If someone said, “I want to be an executive at Walmart, or maybe at A24,” you would think, “This person has no idea what the hell they want to be, or what they’re talking about.” If they were to say, “I want to work for nVidia, or maybe Deloitte," you would think, “This person is just confused, and that’s kind of sad.” But this is exactly equivalent to asserting “I want to work at a FAANG company” or “I want to work at a startup” or, worse, “I want to work in tech”.

So many have been caught off guard as tech has grabbed massive power over nearly every aspect of society—from individuals who can't figure out their career paths to policy makers who've been bamboozled by tech tycoons. It's no secret how it happened: everyone underestimated the impact because they judged tech by the same rules as other industries.

Everything and nothing

These distinctions matter even more because today, everything is tech. Or, if you prefer, nothing is technology. Instead, every area is suffused with tech — and every discipline needs people who are fluent in the concerns of technology, and familiar with the tradeoffs and risks and opportunities that come with the adoption of, and creation of, new technologies.

Now, of course, I know why it’s useful to have the shorthand of being able to say “the tech industry” when talking about a particular sector. But the sleight of hand that comes from being able to hide the enormous, outsized impact that this small number of companies has across a vast number of different sectors of society is possible, in part, because we treat them like they’re one narrow part of the business world. In many cases, an individual division of a giant tech company dwarfs the entirety of other industries. Apple’s AirPods business isn’t even one of the first products one would think of when listing their most important, most influential, or most profitable lines of business, and yet AirPods alone are bigger than the entire domestic radio advertising business in the United States. Google’s ad business alone is larger than the entire U.S. domestic airline industry combined. Things that are considered an “industry” in other categories are smaller than things that are considered a product in “tech”.

That sense of scale is important to keep in mind as we push for accountability and to understand how to plan for what’s ahead. Even building a path for one’s own career — whether that’s inside or outside of the companies we consider to be in the tech sector — requires having a proper perspective on the relative influence of these organizations, and also on the distorting effect it can have when we don’t look at them in their full complexity.

One example from a completely different realm that I find useful in contextualizing this challenge is from the world of retail: Ikea is one of the top 10 restaurants in the world. (By many reports, it’s the 6th largest chain of restaurants.) That is, of course, incidental to its role as a furniture retailer. But this is the nature of massive scale. The second-order impacts are still enough to have outsized effects in the larger world.

At a moment when we have seen that so many of the biggest tech companies are led by people who don’t know how to act responsibly with all of the power that they’ve been given, it’s important that we complicate our views of their companies, and consider that they are much more than just part of the “tech industry”. They are functioning as communications, media, finance, education, infrastructure, transportation, commerce, defense, policing, and government much of the time. And very often, they’re doing it without our awareness or consent.

So, when you hear conversations in society about tech companies, or tech execs, or tech platforms, make sure you push those who are involved in the dialogue to be specific about what they mean. You may find that they haven’t stopped to reflect on the fact that this simple label has long since stopped accurately describing the extraordinary amount of power and control that this handful of companies exert over our daily lives, and over society as a whole.

Memory prices across DRAM, NAND and HBM have surged 80 to 90% quarter-over-quarter in Q1 2026, according to Counterpoint Research's latest Memory Price Tracker. The price of a 64GB RDIMM has jumped from a Q4 2025 contract price of $450 to over $900, and Counterpoint expects it to cross $1,000 in Q2.

NAND, relatively stable last quarter, is tracking a parallel increase. Device makers are cutting DRAM content per device, swapping TLC SSDs for cheaper QLC alternatives, and shifting orders from the now-scarce LPDDR4 to LPDDR5 as new entry-level chipsets support the newer standard. DRAM operating margins hit the 60% range in Q4 2025 -- the first time conventional DRAM margins surpassed HBM -- and Q1 2026 is on track to set all-time highs.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Echo & the Bunnymen

Philip Glass

The Verve

Johann Sebastian Bach

AI-poisoned Y-Combinator pick-me lickspittle throws parade:

Derik Kauffman insists it's not a joke. He's actually planning to hold a March for Billionaires in San Francisco this weekend. And he says he's doing so because he's opposed to a proposed state tax on billionaires and, more simply, because he feels as if the billionaire class has been unfairly vilified. [...]

The point of the event is to "change the sentiment on this to recognize that billionaires have done a lot for us and communicate that we're glad they're here," Kauffman said. [...]

He told The Examiner he's neither a billionaire defending his own interests, nor just acting as a front for the ultrarich. Last year, Kauffman founded an artificial-intelligence startup called RunRL that took part in Y Combinator's accelerator program.

Kauffman said he's not in contact with any billionaires or getting any funding from them, nor are there any other groups involved with the event. Instead, he's footing the cost of the March for Billionaires website himself and is the principal organizer of and publicist for it, he said.

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